Hello everyone,

I have a lot of texts and books I've read here on my house, and what I want is to systematise them in a list or database (I don't know how should it be called). In order to be able to type the name of the author, and get all the names of the books that I have from this author, their years of publication, and other complementary data that belongs to each book. Or maybe type a year, and get a list of all the books that I have, that have been published in that year.

How can I do this? I ask this here because I have never used databases, nor I have any clue of how should I do this.

Can anybody please help?

Thank you very much in advance!

You can certainly design a data base, such as using MySQL or PostgreSQL and develop a web page incorporating PHP for data entry and viewing. That is doable but there is a learning curve curve involved.

Alternately, you could use a collection manager program, such as Tellico http://tellico-project.org/, which is specifically designed for book, CD, video and other collections (and works beautifully).

The one downside? You'll need to install KDE -- it looks like you're using Ubuntu, which uses Gnome, and Tellico is built on KDE libraries (and I don't know if KDE is available for Ubuntu, but my guess would be that it is).

An alternative would be Google for "book collection manager" which turns up a bunch of them for you to evaluate, some aimed at libraries some aimed at individual collectors. One that appears to be quite popular for Gnome users is Alexandria (http://alexandria.rubyforge.org/); probably worth a look-see.

Hope this helps some.

This would be a great way to learn sql. I am convinced that having a real-time problem to solve is the best motivator for learning.

If you need a short-term solution, a spreadsheet would be one option.

If this really is a large number, be sure that you do not underestimate the data entry problem. Repeatedly entering author details, isbn, date of publication (and edition(s) you have) can get quite old quite rapidly, and checking the data, particularly spellings of author names is non-trivial, too. You might consider a system which allows you to get the data from a publicly-accessible database and import it (eg, a bibliography manager), because that might save you the most boring part. On the other hand, if you think that twenty is a large number of books, then that wouldn't be worth bothering with

The reason that I suggested Alexandria, a GNOME application, is that you enter your books using the ISBN and Alexandria searches Amazon.com, the Library of Congress and a number of other sources for all of the other information about the book and download that data for you; e.g., the title, author(s), copyright date, publishing date, publisher, Dewey Decimal Number, LOC number, etc., etc. -- even an image of the cover. Take a look at the features page at http://alexandria.rubyforge.org/features.html to see what I mean.

I've been doing data base design and engineering for over 30 years and, although I thought, "Gee, it would be pretty easy to just do a data base for this stuff," it occurred to me that entering all the information by hand (or designing the functions for searching and downloading the various data formats from public sources) would be a real pain. As it happens I have a library of over 2,500 books and believe me, I did not want to do them by hand! I elected to use Tellico because I do use KDE rather than GNOME but I believe Alexandria and Tellico are functionally similar.

The only down-side I can see is that Alexandria will not run right now on Ubuntu 11.10:
I would anticipate that will be fixed post-haste see http://alexandria.rubyforge.org/.

Hope this helps some.

Hi.

See also responses at http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/new...-database.html ... cheers, makyo